So I have finally built my NAS. I used an N100 CPU because I saw it has low power consumption.
Right now I have 2 NVMe SSDs and 2 HDDs. I have installed proxmox on the 2 SSDs as RAID1. I have not partitioned the HDDs yet, they are just plugged in and powered on.
Just booting into proxmox, without any VMs or containers running, I am pulling 45W from the wall. This looks super high to me, and I’m afraid that starting to use the HDDs and running some VMs may double this…
I don’t have much references, but I have an Odroid with an external self-powered HDD, it is using 5W. I have a raspberry pi 4 with an external HDD, the raspberry is pulling 3W and the HDD 3W.
With these data, I was thinking I wouldn’t go over 20W. 45W is enormous and not something I can run 24/7, kind of a fail for a NAS…
Have I done something wrong or is it just how much it’s supposed to pull?
For power consumption, NVMe drives use quite a lot of power, especially PCIe 4.0 ones. About 5W each during use.
3.5" HDD (especially 7200rpm or more) also consume significantly more than 2.5" 5400rpm HDDs that are optimized for low power (the latter use about 1W during use).
SATA SSDs fall somewhere in the middle.
I’m surprised to hear NVMe us that much power - I had no idea, and just assumed they used very little.
It sounds like from a power perspective that 2.5" is better, and SSD is lowest power?
Thanks. So If I take 5W a disk, I may have 20W just from the disks.
There are still 25W remaining. For a low power CPU that looks like a lot 😕
I never really tested it with 3.5" HDDs, but a google search makes it sound like they might be closer to 10W each.
How does that work out in terms of energy consumption though?
If NVMe is at least 10x faster, but consumes 5x more power, it will use less energy to read or write the same amount of data overall.
To answer that question one would need to dive deeply into idle vs. in active use power consumption. It’s not like a NAS gets turned off when not in use.